Strikes across the frontier and strikes for higher wage

Planet lurches to the right as ideologies engage

Suddenly it’s repression, moratorium on rights

What did they think the politics of panic would invite?

Person in the street shrugs— “Security comes first”

But the trouble with normal is it always gets worse

Callous men in business costume speak computerese

Play pinball with the Third World trying to keep it on its knees

Their single crop starvation plans put sugar in your tea

And the local Third World’s kept on reservations you don’t see

“It’ll all go back to normal if we put our nation first”

But the trouble with normal is it always gets worse

Fashionable fascism dominates the scene

When ends don’t meet it’s easier to justify the means

Tenants get the dregs and landlords get the cream

As the grinding devolution of the democratic dream

Brings us men in gas masks dancing while the shells burst

The trouble with normal is it always gets worse

—Bruce Cockburn, 30 June 1981, Toronto